Everyday Kanji (Kanji on the Street)

Learn from Real Japanese! ~ Kanji on the Street ~

Everyday Kanji introduces 1 Kanji a video. Introducing the meaning of the Kanji, reading (for both On-yomi and Kun-yomi) and stroke order of a Kanji in animation. In addition, example sentences of the Kanji and real Japanese signboard, Kanban on the street are shown. Therefore this course is easy to follow and quite practical as well.

Occasionally there are review and summary of the lessons so that you can enhance your memory and prepare for the day you're visiting Japan. All lessons are practical as it's really used in real Japanese.

What is Kanji?

Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the Japanese writing system. They are used alongside the Japanese syllabic scripts: hiragana and katakana.

Kanji (漢字), one of the three scripts used in the Japanese language, are Chinese characters, which were first introduced to Japan in the 5th century via the Korean peninsula.

Kanji are ideograms, i.e. each character has its own meaning and corresponds to a word. By combining characters, more words can be created. For example, the combination of "buy(買)" with "thing(物)" means "shopping（買物）".

Kanji are used for writing nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. Unlike the Chinese language, Japanese cannot be written entirely in kanji. For grammatical endings and words without corresponding kanji, two additional, syllable-based scripts are being used, hiragana and katakana, each consisting of 46 syllables.